On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 12:42 AM, Sergey Bochkanov <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, William. > > You wrote 4 мая 2010 г., 22:34:58: > >> Could you write a little more to sage-devel about why mathematicians >> might care about "support vector machines" -- it's possible that most >> people reading this have never heard of them. > > Being sage-devel reader for a while I may say that SAGE users are > mostly interested in symbolic algebra, graph theory, other kinds of > "exact algebra" (finite rings, etc.). Interest in numerical processing > is much more lower.
This is somewhat true, but very unfortunate. A big part of the "mission statement" of the Sage project is to create a viable free open source alternative to Matlab. As such, numerical processing is just as important as symbolics to the Sage project. And, it's important to me too. In fact, the last major code I wrote for Sage was a new fairly complete hidden Markov model library, which I wrote from scratch. That's 100% numerical code. > > Looks like we (Open Source Community) have: > * R - for statistical processing > * Octave - for numerical processing > * SAGE - for symbolic/"exact" problems > > What do you think about such specialization? Is it intentional? I do not like it at all. The goal of Sage is certainly not to be only for symbolic/exact problems. Note that R is part of Sage, as are numpy, scipy, cvxopt, and GSL, as you of course know. These were all added several years ago, when we decided that numerical computation must be a central goal of Sage. > P.S. I've thought on writing SAGEable Python wrapper for ALGLIB. This > idea came to me when I worked with automatically generated C# wrapper > for MPIR. It started as MPIR-related project, but now I see that the > same technology can be applied to other software projects. > > I know that SAGE already has GSL wrapper, but two projects don't > overlap each other. Some functionality is present only in GSL, some - > only in ALGLIB. But is numerical analysis really needed in the SAGE? Yes, numerical analysis is definitely really, really needed in Sage. In fact, it is likely to be by far the most important part of Sage in the long run. William > > -- > With best regards, > Sergey mailto:[email protected] > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
